1st UNITED DOOR TECHNOLOGIES, LLC, founded in 2000, is a garage door manufacturer based in Tempe, Arizona with 5 distribution centers located throughout Arizona, California and Utah, with additional locations planned. They serve garage door dealers and homebuilders with unique and distinctive garage doors that enhance the beauty and value of homes. They have a wide range product line of residential and commercial garage doors manufactured from steel and wood. Their garage doors include top quality materials, the best manufacturing processes and exclusive design innovations.

First United Door Technologies focuses on value and quality with every garage door we produce. Our Universal WoodGrain collection is no exception. These garage doors are an affordable solution to add style to your house.

Blog Archive: July 2012

Think hip-hugger pants, shag carpeting and, yes, even wood garage doors. The wood garage doors of the 1970s are back in a big way. It’s one of many design trends that have come and gone.

The first revolution in garage door materials happened in the 1980s, when raised panel steel doors replaced wood ones. They continue to dominate the market today, mainly because they’re economical and low-maintenance. But for certain homes — especially custom homes or those with an Old World look — a big expanse of cold steel just won’t do. Frequently the garage door is a major part of the front of a home and people are finding that they can do something more interesting.

For this reason, wood has become the most popular option. But these aren’t the humble wood doors of two decades ago. First United Door Technologies offers wood doors in a carriage-house style that has an old-fashioned craftsman look. Made of the finest wood, they offer a much richer appearance and you can expect to pay four times or more what you would for steel doors.

There’s a lot of talk about curb appeal being the driving force drawing buyers into your home. It makes sense. If the house looks a mess from the outside, what buyer would want to set foot inside?

Well, maybe your house isn’t quite a mess. You have taken the time to fix-up the landscape, power-washed the house, and even painted the mailbox. But did you overlook what can be the biggest eyesore — the garage? It’s the largest architectural element on the house. So it really, in this day and age, is impossible to dismiss the garage door as an important architectural element.

But the garage door is more than an architectural element. It can be a trigger point for buyers. They’re driving down the street in a tract-home neighborhood and suddenly they spot a custom wooden garage door. It’s striking and different and often gives them reason to stop and take a closer look, maybe even come inside.

If you have a house that has a nice garage door, it sets the stage for the fact that everything else in the house is going to have attention to detail and it really does differentiate homes that are on the same street. With [more]

As it gets warmer, we tend to see people leaving their garage doors open about 12 inches. Does this really keep the house cooler? It seems like it would just let in more heat

There could be a couple of different reasons some people leave their garage doors slightly ajar.

Letting in some air to drain off some of the heat in the garage wouldn’t necessarily make the house itself hotter, but it could keep the garage cooler, especially if there were a breeze blowing from the right direction. And it’s possible some people might have some heat-sensitive junk stored in the garage or maybe something that doesn’t smell so great.

But probably the main reason: garage-door openers.

Hot air rises, right? It’s probably hot enough in your garage as it is, assuming it’s not air-conditioned. But up near the ceiling it’s a lot hotter. Many garage-door openers come equipped with a heat sensor that sort of pulls the plug on the opener when the mechanism gets too hot. That’s to prevent fires. So leaving your door up a few inches helps keep the garage a bit ventilated. Of course, you don’t want to leave it up high enough for a burglar to wiggle [more]